Scarf – gathers information from around 2,000 open source projects and where they are downloaded and used, particularly for production deployments.
Their new report, covering Q1 2023, reveals the number of downloads for open source has gone up by 60 percent over the previous quarter, while the number of companies downloading open source projects has gone up by 18.5 percent. This is proof of the usual economic angle around open source during downturn events. It should also be useful for those open source companies looking to secure funding or support their valuations with hard data on production deployments.
As part of the release on this, there are some interesting findings:
- As a country, Russia has the biggest increase in open source downloads, followed by Ireland and the Netherlands.
You might think that economic sanctions around technology would affect the open source sector too – however, open source has to be available to all in order to be ‘open’ and there can’t be any restrictions on what open source is used for, or who can use it - Oracle is the company that made the most open source downloads, followed by a mix of other tech companies (Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Intel) and large end-users (General Motors, Disney, Cigna, and J.B. Hunt Transport Service
